The Dream Collector

1. Dragged up the stairs of accident and damage towards the broken concrete fortress, you stick your head through the broken tiles and collect what was left behind at school: dinosaurs, educational television, twigs for fingers when you couldn't write.

2. Put your dolls aside and face up to the day. Your family is a series of cut-out figures hidden in the forest and who knows what else might emerge? Always the shadow memory of moments from your past, the echoing cathedral of endurance.

3. You see faces in the rain and imagine riding a carousel horse away from the rotting and discarded now. The glass is always broken and missing, there are always steps and ladders to climb. There is no way out of everybody's dreams.

 text © Rupert M Loydell 2022

illus © A C Evans 1998

Vespula Vanishes

 

Vespula Vanishes is a new A C Evans poetry collection published Inclement Publishing (edited by Michelle Foster) in a limited edition of twenty copies. Here is a recent review notice by Steve Sneyd from Data Dump 118, Feb. 2008.

VESPULA VANISHES AND OTHER POEMS Inclement (Poetry for the Modern Soul), 2007 Limited Edition

Vespula Vanishes is dedicated to Tori Amos* and tells of a lady come ‘out of the light’, finding the elegant world she could not articulate a day place that ‘ignored her pain’, and via twilight longings this ‘ghostly shape of desire’ dissolved ‘into the night’. Is this title poem of A C Evans’ latest collection decadent psychological portrait or evocation of other (worldly) woman? Of the 25 poems here many raise similar questions as to the boundary condition/genre definition, intriguingly some are predominantly urban or other urban/social/mental decay evocations, and a few are niche-able as more clearly genre, including Lust For A Vampire (Mircalla) her ‘breasts running with gore’, the Dark Tower-set Slave Mask ‘A face I can trust because/ I cannot see your pain./Do you understand why I/ Lick your wounds tonight?’ etc being DF, while there is at least a trace of Sfnal, e.g. Lost Words with its ‘closed sphere’ holding a world last of ‘resplendent/dying/suns’, Only Shadows’ ‘failing star’ (ACE sharing Clark Ashton Smith’s love of star death imagery) and, in the enigmatic post-Surreal definitions of Reflections In A Mirror, alongside those for ‘closed syllable’ and ‘sympiesometer’ is ‘Jupiter’ as ‘an organic arabesque’ and ‘intellect’ as a ‘new type of space’, though the payoff is back to decadent psychology with ‘sacrament…morbid fear of light’.
* Whose only UK No 1 hymned the darkside figure of the ‘Professional Widow’

The poem Slave Mask from Vespula Vanishes also appeared in the collection Dark Tower 3 The Black Throne (2007) from Atlantean Publishing (edited by D J Tyrer) who published Fractured Muse, a previous collection from A C.

A review of Vespula Vanishes & Other Poems by Eve Kimber of Pulsar Poetry Webzine can be found here 

Medium Of Doubt

 

Collage, an ambiguous, complex medium of doubt, to quote Werner Spies, is an aesthetic of radical juxtaposition. In his personal treatise Beyond Painting (1947), Max Ernst, with reference to both Rimbaud, and the famous 'chance encounter' from Book 6 of Les Chants de Maldoror, defined collage as an 'alchemy of the image...' . However,the photomontage style of collage finds its origins in the work of the Berlin Dada Movement who in turn were inspired by the inadvertent imagery generated by early cinema special effects and the composite images of 'trick photography'. The term photomontage was invented by the Berlin 'monteurs', Raoul Hasmann and Hanna Hoch.

From the Freudian perspective it may be that collage exemplifies one of the two 'laws' governing the behaviour of unconscious processes or phenomena (such as dreams): the law of Condensation, or Compression, as it is also called. (The second 'law' is the law of Displacement.) Freud explained Condensation as the 'inclination to create new unities out of elements that we would certainly have kept separate in waking thought...' In 'The Enormous Face' section of his novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), J G Ballard refers to the 'planes of intersection' operative on 'a third level, the inner world of the psyche' where, as on other levels, such 'planes' interlock at oblique angles and where one finds 'fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies...'

Elsewhere is the same book Ballard asserts that images are born at the intersection of such planes, when 'some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.'

Illustration: Psychic Citadel, 2002